Former White House director of strategic communications, Alyssa Farah Griffin, argued that former President Donald Trump's victory in South Carolina over Nikki Haley is far from a win for the GOP.
“Somebody who’s running as virtually an incumbent — Donald Trump — getting 60%, and 40% being against him? That’s not a mandate," Griffin, now a CNN political commentator, said during a Saturday panel for the network. "Especially with the entire Republican Party apparatus behind him, with most elected Republicans behind him.”
Griffin continued: “Now, it’s unclear what a path could look like for Nikki Haley. I think we’re all very open-eyed about that. But she is underscoring the fundamental weakness of Donald Trump, and it should be a five-alarm fire for the party, but for some reason, it is not.”
A recent Politico report similarly noted that with about three-quarters of the South Carolina primary votes tallied, around 40 percent of voters rejected Trump. Though the stat isn't an issue in the primary, as Politico noted, it could pose a threat to Trump's re-election campaign in a general election — exit polls found that he lost moderate and liberal voters to Haley by a large margin, while a little over 1 in 5 Republican voters said they would not vote for Trump in the presidential election, per AP VoteCast. “I’m an accountant. I know 40 percent is not 50 percent,” Haley said on Saturday. “But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”
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